Not All Who Wander Are Lost

30 Things

1. There are 30 things because I am thirty years old.
2. I have a wife. Her name is Darcie, and I met her at Bard College in 1991. We dropped out together a year later. We've been married for six years.
3. I think it's been six years. I have a really poor sense of time.
4. When I was growing up, my parents were always running late. I didn't know they showed previews in the movie theater before the movie until I started going on my own in sixth grade.
5. Sixth grade was when I had my first date. I picked up Celeste, less popular twin sister of Bianca, at her parents house and we walked down to the movies to see Amadeus. Amadeus is three hours long, which is much too long for a first date. I remember my hand going numb in hers after a while. We had ice cream at Brighams afterwards.
6. This was all in Newton, Massachussets. I grew up in Newton.
7. Before that, I lived in Belmont, Massachussets.
8. I was actually born in Atlanta, Georgia, but we moved to Belmont when I was nine months old so I don't remember any of it.
9. I tell people that I was named after two trees, the Joshua tree and the Linden tree, but I don't think my parents did that on purpose.
10. My daughter Willow is also named after a tree.
11. Willow has my eyes and hair, but otherwise looks like her mother.
12. Willow, her mother and I live in an apartment on the end of a prep school dormitory.
13. We also live with a Jack Russel Terrier named Zellie, and a tiger cat named Jacob.
14. I didn’t like dogs before I met Darcie. Now I do.
15. I was allergic to cats, but it went away.
16. The dog likes living at the prep school because the tennis courts are right next door. The baby loves people, and the tree outside her window rustling in the wind. The cat could care less. Darcie likes the community, and so do I. But mostly, I like working here because I love teaching.
17. I teach media and communications. This term, I'm teaching a course in deconstruction and analysis of popular animated satire. Mostly, we sit around and watch bits of South Park and The Simpsons and then talk about the relationship between methodology and the satirical subject.
18. I also work with other teachers in and out of their classrooms to integrate best-practice technology into their classes and pedagogy.
19. I also run the media center.
20. I use words like methodology and pedagogy as part of my normal vocabulary. Can't help it.
21. I've always been a stickler for language.
22. That's why I'm the proofreader for the school yearbook. That, and the fact that my wife is the advisor to the yearbook.
23. In college, I made extra cash by editing senior thesis papers.
24. Later, I also made money teaching writing and math at the local elementary school.
25. That wasn't my first experience with teaching, though. I was a teacher and public demonstrator at the Boston Museum of Science for three years before we moved to Vermont in 1995 so I could go back to school.
26. The school was Marlboro College. I lived on campus for my first year, in the dormitories, driving ten miles on weekends down the dirtroad mountain to Darcie's parents house. The next year we moved in to the ground floor apartment of an old two-family converted farmhouse on the grounds of a hotel in Brattleboro. There was a pond out the window with two white swans.
27. Darcie and I got married the summer before my senior year. It was August, and she was as beautiful as she is today, at 29.
28. I got my degree in American Studies and Sociology (Cyberstudies) from Marlboro in '97.
29. That summer, I got a job as a media specialist at Northfield Mount Hermon school. I spent the next year working full time all day and attending school all weekend, finally getting a MA in Teaching with Internet Technologies at the end of the following summer. Darcie stopped commuted to Vermont each day to teach elementary school and started working with yearbook and tutoring at the prep school. We summered at folk festivals, traveling where and when we can, wandering for the sake of wandering, having grand adventures on weekends and school holidays. We started trying to have children, and, when that didn't seem to be working yet, got a dog instead. Willow was born this past July, four years later.
30. I've reached all my life goals by thirty. I win.